Economic Prosperity: A Step of Faith

"There is a strong relationship between economic prosperity and religious liberty."

Persons, Their Dignity, and Work (John Paul II series)

The encyclical Laborem exercens, written in 1981 while the Polish workers' movement Solidarity resisted its Communist government, speaks to the nature of work and the innate dignity of human beings:

"Work is one of the characteristics that distinguish man from the rest of creatures, whose activity for sustaining their lives cannot be called work. Only man is capable of work, and only man works, at the same time by work occupying his existence on earth. Thus work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons. And this mark decides its interior characteristics; in a sense it constitutes its very nature. . . ." (intro.)

"In order to continue our analysis of work, an analysis linked with the word of the Bible telling man that he is to subdue the earth, we must concentrate our attention on work in the subjective sense, much more than we did on the objective significance, barely touching upon the vast range of problems known intimately and in detail to scholars in various fields and also, according to their specializations, to those who work. If the words of the Book of Genesis to which we refer in this analysis of ours speak of work in the objective sense in an indirect way, they also speak only indirectly of the subject of work; but what they say is very eloquent and is full of great significance.

"Man has to subdue the earth and dominate it, because as the "image of God" he is a person, that is to say, a subjective being capable of acting in a planned and rational way, capable of deciding about himself, and with a tendency to self-realization. As a person, man is therefore the subject to work. As a person he works, he performs various actions belonging to the work process; independently of their objective content, these actions must all serve to realize his humanity, to fulfill the calling to be a person that is his by reason of his very humanity.

"This does not mean that, from the objective point of view, human work cannot and must not be rated and qualified in any way. It only means that the primary basis of the value of work is man himself, who is its subject. This leads immediately to a very important conclusion of an ethical nature: however true it may be that man is destined for work and called to it, in the first place work is "for man" and not man "for work". Through this conclusion one rightly comes to recognize the pre-eminence of the subjective meaning of work over the objective one. Given this way of understanding things, and presupposing that different sorts of work that people do can have greater or lesser objective value, let us try nevertheless to show that each sort is judged above all by the measure of the dignity of the subject of work, that is to say the person, the individual who carries it out. On the other hand: independently of the work that every man does, and presupposing that this work constitutes a purpose-at times a very demanding one-of his activity, this purpose does not possess a definitive meaning in itself. In fact, in the final analysis it is always man who is the purpose of the work, whatever work it is that is done by man-even if the common scale of values rates it as the merest "service", as the most monotonous even the most alienating work. . . .

"[I]n the light of the analysis of the fundamental reality of the whole economic process-first and foremost of the production structure that work is-it should be recognized that the error of early capitalism can be repeated wherever man is in a way treated on the same level as the whole complex of the material means of production, as an instrument and not in accordance with the true dignity of his work-that is to say, where he is not treated as subject and maker, and for this very reason as the true purpose of the whole process of production.

"This explains why the analysis of human work in the light of the words concerning man's "dominion" over the earth goes to the very heart of the ethical and social question. This concept should also find a central place in the whole sphere of social and economic policy, both within individual countries and in the wider field of international and intercontinental relationships, particularly with reference to the tensions making themselves felt in the world not only between East and West but also between North and South." (section 6)

John Paul II ties work to the human vocation. For him, it is a biblical idea, one arising from the creation mandates of Genesis. Work must not, however, reduce human beings to their material existence alone. It must play a role in and recognize the nature of human beings--their personhood, their communal existence, their social and ethical existence, their need to make and create, to produce and partake. Human economic systems--socialist, communist, capitalist--that treat persons as objects, rather than as subjects, are to be condemned and brought to repentance.

Dorothy Day's Personalism--Some Resources

Since I don't have time to summarize the way personalism was worked out by Catholic Worker activist Dorothy Day, a few links are in order:

The Catholic Worker on Day's Personalism and Distributism

The Influence of Emmanuel Mounier upon Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day's Radical Hospitality (Baylor Center for Christian Ethics)

Emmanuel Mounier and Realities of Personalism

Emmanuel Mounier's 1949 volume Personalism represents his mature thought on the ideological and political position by that name that he helped promote in France during the first half of the twentieth century. While Mounier's career as a writer and social critic had been dedicated to a criticism of bourgeois liberal society, the Second World War forced him to recognize the potential for totalitarian abuse in both communist and fascist governments. Unlike his Catholic counterpart Jacques Maritain who came to support something like Wilsonian democracy, Mounier in his remaining few years was more drawn to a socialist vision. Nonetheless, Personalism,as Mounier himself admitted, did not necessarily obligate its adherents to one political platform. Indeed, one wonders that if Mounier had lived, might he have developed a personalist critique of socialism as well?

Mounier begins his slim volume by observing how the Christian notion of the person challenged ancient Greco-Roman notions:

1. Christianity counters the classic distrust of multiplicity with a notion of God's unity working itself out in the diversity of human actions of love.
2. The human being is increasingly understood as "an indissoluble whole" rather than a conglomerate of various elements.
3. God is personal and offers a personal relationship of intimacy and participation to each person.
4. The kingdom of God is not an abstract ideal but a promise of a transformed world and a changed inner heart.
5. God created persons as free creatures to grow and mature.
6. The Incarnation brings together heaven and earth, the mystical and the physical into a complex and affirming unity.

Personalism, Mounier insisted, is not Hegelian idealism, but a recognition of the embodied nature of human beings who in transforming the material, natural world are to "liberate things as well as humanity" (12). Wisdom, in its industry, does not exploit material existence but humanizes the natural world, a world "red in tooth and claw" (to recall Tennyson) which so often seems against us. Thus, we are possessed of a "tragic optimism," even in the face of struggle and effort.

Personalism is also not individualism, which Mounier dismissed as "a system of morals, feelings, ideas, and institutions in which individuals can be organized by their mutual isolation and defense" (18). Personalism is instead fueled by the drive to "decentralize" the human self, to give of oneself, donate oneself to others. Without communication comes madness; without giving comes destruction. We become fully persons as we embrace "an economic of donation, not of compensation nor of calculation," as we give ourselves to others in self-bestowal. This also requires a stability of faithful relations with persons across time and space. We can best be faithful to those we remain with long-term.

Mounier had little patience with romanticizing a communal past of small villages, and he upheld not only the notion of human equality but human rights as that which protects and makes human freedom possible. Yet he also stressed the need for people to divest themselves of property and wealth in giving to others, thereby achieving their own personal and spiritual maturity. He imagined this affirmation of love as one requiring struggle both inwardly and outwardly, for the virtue of fortitude was absolutely necessary for personal growth.

Mournier also rejected notions of freedom either as indifference to the physical world or as pure spontaneity of action. Freedom is instead human love working its way out in responsibility. "Our liberties can be no more than opportunities offered to the spirit of freedom" (62). Freedom and personality fulfill themselves in the higher transcendence of a divine purpose: "My freedom itself comes to me as something given: its supreme moments are not those in which I exercise most will-power; they are moments rather of giving-way, or of offering myself to freedom newly encountered or to a value that I love" (66).

Still, Mounier the activist realized that political responses were inevitably compromised. He held that the political and prophetic voices must listen to each other, as well as other kinds of gestures and movements, such as those of industry and contemplation. "Nevertheless, though to 'engage' oneself is to consent to make-shift, to something impure, . . .and to accept one's limitations," he observed; "it does not sanctify one's abdication of personality to any abandonment of the values that it serves. . . . The troubled and sometimes agonized conscience caused by the impurities of our cause should keep us far from fanaticism, in a state of vigilant criticism. . . . The risks we have to run, and the partial obscurity in which we have to take decisions, put us in the state of dispossession, insecurity and hardihood which is the climate of all great action" (92-3).

Mourier held out hope that the slow death of Christendom promised a Christianity "slowly returning to it first position; renouncing government upon earth and outward appearance of sanctification to achieve the unique work of the Church, the community of Christians in Christ, mingles among all men in the secular work,--neither theocracy nor liberalism, but a return to the double rigours of transcendence and incarnation" (122).

Is the Economic Crisis a Sin for Society

Article Subtitle: "Why America needs a new Social Gospel"

This is an interesting article by Gary Dorrien, Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University.

Faith, Economics, and Ecology Article

"As the world heats up and economic dislocation ravages the poor, religious leaders offer up their diagnoses and prescriptions"

Charity and the Politics of Honors

Caritas is the ancient Christian notion of love as concretely expressed in public and private actions. As a Latin term it almost functions as a cognate to the New Testament notion of agape. The two certainly overlap. Love (caritas, agape, call it what you will) can expose the hidden motives behind our attempts at honors, including that of academic programs.

Marilyn McCord Adams has observed that evils in life are not limited to questions of pain and morality. Esteem and disesteem make up a serious component in the way we value our lives: “[T]he category of honor centers, not on the evaluation of deeds, but on the sacred quality of persons," which is not to deny there is any relationship existing between conduct and honor. As a public and social system of regard, honor is something that is garnered because it is both owned by the person and given by the society. That universities regularly trade in systems of honor and shame: grades, awards, regalia, scholarships, and so on, should give us pause. As Adams further notes, honor (or shame) takes both “ascribed” and “acquired” forms: the former is given because of a person’s birth, class, or station; the later results from highly regarded deeds or misdeeds. The emphasis, rather than being on the quality of the actions themselves, however, falls on the person in toto. (The honors student is, well, more honorable, right?) We should not forget that symbolic systems of identity such as these are real matters of import for our students. Honor and shame have painful implications. The experience of even minor evils can disgrace a person, and that loss of honor can result in real anguish and humiliation. Psychic pain is as real as physical pain, and at times even more important for how it deforms and even destroys human self-regard.

Nothing about this understanding need assume the academic "innocence" of the “victims” who are "robbed" of self-respect. A poor performing student is a poor performing student. But our gifted students, the kind I tend to see in honors education, even more often have their reputations and self-conceptions tied to the academic system of rewards. The student in question may not think of himself or herself as a participant in a combative academy of honor, but something like that does continue to exist. A system of honor and shame takes place inevitably in an environment of challenge and riposte. Honor is a symbolic quality that must be maintained by the person in question. One either continues to gather and defend one’s honor, or one loses it. Any challenge--let us say, an average or poor grade-- to a person’s honor calls for some kind of response:

1. “positive rejection,” in which the person (or professor) making the challenge is deemed inferior and therefore unworthy of consideration at all;
2. “negative refusal,” in which case the person is now considered shamed--always a dicey approach in academics; or
3. “acceptance of the challenge” which can result in a war of wit (or arms) in a cycle of counter-challenges (Adams 109-110).

This pattern can take academic forms, even in a Christian environment that prides itself as a supportive atmosphere.

We need to take a long look at how their system of honor feeds into the modern social imaginary. The economic state of the West appears to be built more and more on a new pagan desire for libidio and power and for a stable control of human destiny; it wants to offer a revised salvation of personal prosperity and life needs satisfied. What kind of honor are we preparing our students to receive?

An eschatological structure, as I've discussed in the last two posts, can move in repentant or rebellious directions, moving toward or away from God's intended pattern of development. Offering a new millennium, the current libidinal world economy offers a false eschatology, narratives of sexual and consumerist salvation--an end to repression, an awakening to utter multiplicity of desire; the body as pseudo-sacramental hypersexualization able to endlessly buy and consume products of desire. The modern media and consumerist state functions as a secular soteriology which will not permit the claims of Christ as the only Lord (Caesar). Our modern social spaces are what Graham Ward calls cities of aspiration and desire; unable to offer a true community, they only manage autonomous individuals in their personal choices. "It is not good to eat much honey, or to seek honor on top of honor. Like a city breached, without walls, is one who lacks self-control." (Prov 25:27-28). Such a statement, I realize, sounds faintly puritanical and bizarre, maybe even unpatriotic, to modern ears.

To speak of the "politics" and "economy" of the Christian Church is to risk confusion because to speak of the Church (and the Christian university) as a counter-polis is to expand the definition of Realpolitik to a sacramental vision of virtue-oriented traditions. These traditions have the end of God's kingdom reigning over all. The libertarian society of atomic individuals, by contrast, is a truncated politics. The purpose of power and honor is forgotten; or worse, it is made into insatiable desire itself. To train our students for this, to make them leaders in such a system, is problematic. The church as public polis is really trans-political in the modern sense of that word, and the local and the small may reflect far better the kind of honor and worth we wish to train our students to undergo and to give away. In the same way the oikos of God, God's household, transcends our normal conceptions of economics as certain macro and micro-systems of human monetary exchange.

Admittedly, this seems like an uphill battle when we as Americans, for example, treat our educations as economic counters of the more limited kind, but we as global Christians have the gifts of congregation and scripture to counter them with. The cross of Christ is, after all, an apocalypse, a revelation of God's judgment on the powers that be. His stigmata are signs of compassion. Atonement makes our education both polis and oikos, politics and economy, but of a far wider place. The sacrifice and splendor of a cross-shaped teaching will be wasteful in its love for and on the students. The crowns of heaven we receive can be cast down at the feet of Jesus, and now we multiply honor when we freely pour it out in sacrifice.

We cannot squander what we cannot exhaust. The love of God is a generative principle within our pedagogies.

Free Market Faith

"Globalisation is leading to more belief, not less. Caspar Melville talks to the editor of The Economist about his new book tracing the rise and rise of religion."

Religion and Money: The Price of Faith

"For the most devout practitioners - perhaps 15% of Americans, if measured by how frequently they attend services - following their faith's precepts often has a profound financial impact: Religion guides how they make, spend, and invest their money. And it often leads to financial decisions and stresses far different from those of people who don't share their beliefs. To explore how religion affects the way people manage their money, we visited with three families of different faiths who are struggling to reconcile their spiritual beliefs with their wallets. Their stories, and our advice to them, follow. What all three households have in common: the desire to let faith guide their economic prospects, without undermining their family's security or long-term goals. As you'll see, that isn't always an easy task. . ."

Survey: Americans Reclassifying Luxury, Necessity in Recession

"A Pew Research Center survey released Thursday finds that the recession has changed Americans' minds about many items that used to seen as necessities. In a 2006 Pew survey of luxuries and necessities, 68% said a microwave was a necessity; now that's 47%. And 52% say a TV is a necessity today, down from 64% in 2006."

Perhaps the recession is helping reduce some of the materialism in American culture.